Finally, YouTube Music Wants You to Understand Every Song

What do we mean by true lovers of music? They’re the ones who appreciate it as an art form and believe that music knows no borders. For listeners like these, YouTube Music is testing a built-in lyrics translation feature. As you’d expect, it reveals the meaning of songs performed in languages they don’t understand in real time.

YouTube Music will soon offer real-time lyrics translation in the app!

The feature adds a simple yet powerful option to the app’s lyrics view. When users tap Translate, YouTube Music automatically generates a machine translation of the lyrics and displays it directly beneath the original lines (via Android Authority). This allows listeners to follow along and understand the song’s meaning in real time.

Credits: Reddit/AlonsoDelJunco

Right now, the translation feature is tied to your device’s language settings. In other words, you can’t choose a translation language inside YouTube Music yet, because the app automatically matches it to whatever language your phone is set to. If you want to see lyrics in a different language, you’ll need to change your system or app language manually. I don’t see a problem here, to be frank.

Music lovers have long used third-party websites or apps to look up and translate lyrics manually. For example, Spotify and Apple Music offer lyrics translation feature, and Musixmatch is yet another tool which you connect for the feature. By embedding translation directly into the app, YouTube Music could remove that friction.

As with any new feature, Google hasn’t said when it will roll out widely. But this test suggests that real-time lyric translation could soon become a standard part of how we experience music across languages. We’ll be sure to let you know once there’s official word or if the rollout starts reaching more users.